tactfullyblunt

bifurcated litany

At first I questioned Bill's decision to wait, but now I know that when the time comes, if possible, I will most likely do the same thing because the possibility of receiving a gift like the one we had with P. last night would be too enticing to pass up.

For the most part, last night was passed with Mr. P in a state of stupor that made it seem as if he'd already left us. And then, right as we were shutting the bedroom up so that we could go to sleep, Bill moved Penn from our bed into his own little wine box bed on the floor so that we wouldn't unknowingly punt him off during our sleep. He spent a few seconds in the box before standing up, staggering the four steps across the floor, and performing the most amazing feat of strength by launching himself halfway up our bed and then scrabbling with his back feet until he pulled himself up into the bed. Penn looked at me drunkenly and then flopped down on the bed. "Wow, I guess he really wants to be with us." Bill said, and we stared at one another for a few seconds, shocked by the short vision of the old, stubbornly lovable Penn.

This morning, after passing the stony night of silence (I'm serious, his breath wasn't even making a sound), he greeted us with loud purring. He hasn't purred for the last two days, which is unheard of for him. I like to think it was his way of letting us know he loved us for letting him sleep with us last night.

I have no more words. This is exceptionally difficult to watch, as it has been one of my cats who indirectly caused Penn's segregation the last two years (Penn attacked Geneva the week before the wedding and has never lost the taste for her blood). I feel an immense amount of guilt for the way he has lived his life, and while everyday I asked Bill if he'd pet his cat yet, if he'd told his cat how much he loved him, and if he'd checked on Penn's water or food, it doesn't make up for this shitty situation at all.

Peace out, Penndle.

Happy Birthday, Monkey's Uncle in the J

Dear Mom,

I know you don't need a reminder, but it's been a year since you died. I figure the novelty of spying on your kids has long since worn off, what with your happy hours with JFK, Jimmy Hoffa, JP II and Peter Jennings and all, so I just wanted to share my knowledge bumps with you (in no particular order of importance).

No matter how many talks we had in the lead up to your "transition"--a year later and I still hate that cheesy word--the rest of the world remains unclear about exactly how I felt about you. The moments with the fahmalee have been bad enough, but far worse have been the totally insensitive and way off-base assumptions made by people outside the family. Unfortunately, people have willingly stepped into that vacuum to talk about shit they know nothing about, even going so far as to use our relationship as an excuse for their own poor behavior. This has been a bit of a challenge to me.

I suppose you'd think that would make me upset with you, but it doesn't. I'm pretty good at seeing exactly who is causing the upset, in case you didn't realize that before you died. Besides, if there is one thing I have learned this year, it's that far too many people take this life too seriously; so seriously that they're willing to use the dead to do it. I have done the best I can to bring humor to every situation, even at my own expense. I've dropped the ball on this quite a few times along the way, so I'm aiming for more humor this coming year.

Still and all, it's been a tough slog through the holiday season. It's strange how many people seem to feel it ABSOLUTELY IMPERATIVE to make comments about how they can't understand how anyone could be sad during the holidays (one person even said that it was rude!!). Even when I've casually pointed out (with not a tear in my eye) that some people have lost a loved one and that makes it a little difficult to plaster on a smile all of the time, I've almost always been met with a "get over it" type response. My knee-jerk response is to wish all manner of hateful karmic things on them, but when I come to my senses I often find myself praying for these people that they never have to have their childlike innocence stripped from them. After all, with such spoiled child behavior, it's obvious that they couldn't handle losing someone during the holidays.

As a person who already had a tendency to feeling low this time of year, the cosmic joke of your passing during the holiday season isn't lost on me. I've done really well this year but malls and Christmas decorations have made me a little misty a few times. I've introduced as many new traditions as I can as a way of dealing with your passage (including hosting a Happy Unbirthday party with the fahmalee as a way to mark the anniversary of your death). Most of them involve food and activities, so you'll be happy to know that I've gained back all of the weight I'd lost last December. I was looking fairly hollow there for a while, but there is no worry of that now, fo sho.

I'm sure you'd be shocked to know that overall, despite the times I've risen to the ugly behaviors of others with my own ugly behaviors, I've gained a lot of ground in the loving department. Without sharing too much of our recent private interactions with the internets, your family is tentatively poised for great growth this coming year thanks to a few carefully placed connections made over Christmas. It would be great if this time you gave your blessing and allowed these relationships to grow beyond what you were comfortable with during your lifetime. They are no longer a threat to you, and in fact, would be a great testament to the children you created.

Mostly I just wanted to say that while I've never been one for revisionist history, I've learned a lot about "us" this last year--I miss you more than most people give me credit. That and also somehow I feel like my New Year this year began on December 31.

Give my love to Sleeping Bear,
Jen

hello again, hello

Today I ate my lunch with your hair.

Not the crisp, grey wig you wear now.
Even after ten years, that wasn't ever really you.
No, I mean the hair you taught me to expect.

I never really noticed your brown teeth, green skin and
red-rimmed eyes, but each time I saw you it was like
my mind had to relearn: Her perfect hair is gone.

I saw your hair one other time, last January at the Home Depot.
It was bobbing along atop a bright green stadium coat,
With great, long, proud strides next to a tall, white-haired man
Who held out his hand.

That is how I want to remember your hair.
Not forever tied to Christmas at The Mall.

bouncing, baby

I was amused to find this morning that someone had asked Jeeves the following: Give me a sentence using the word diatribe. Apparently, even though I'm somewhere around number four on the list, I'm not so much feeling diatribe this morning as much as conflicted and mental.

I have been watching CNN coverage and am completely overwhelmed by what I've seen. I can't even imagine what it is like to be in the areas hit by the hurricane, but I do know what it's like to be here and feel totally overcome by the need to do something to help these people. Somehow donating to the Red Cross doesn't really feel like doing anything and neither does donating money to my local parish for a predominately/historically Catholic area's relief. I'm just totally overwhelmed...

Last night, on my comfortable, dry couch, after eating catfish and corn on the cob, my brain finally did what it always does and turned the situation into something much more embarrassingly personal for me. I'd like to think the thought didn't come because I'm so egotistical to think that everything that happens in the world has to relate directly to me, but I can't even push that thought away knowing how self-centered I really am. Still, there it was, slapping me in the face.

If I try to believe the best about myself, I can only say that perhaps it was all that water, all of those people displaced, all of the desolation and desperation I felt at seeing them and knowing that I was not in a place to help them because I was trying so hard not to figuratively drown myself. That I was totally empathisizing with their loss...but any further comparison between the tsunami and this situation pretty much pales and I'm not the person to do it any justice.

In truth, I realize I saw the comparison, the timeline and the devastation through a filter that made it not seem so random--in a very dark way. Exactly nine months prior to this, almost to the day, my mother passed away during the aftermath of the tsunami. She kept saying there were people there she didn't recognize, far too many people in the room, please tell them to come back later.

So I'm wondering: 9 months. Water. Overwhelming sadness. What kind of thing is being birthed here?

vision. getting. cloudy.

deepbreathsdeepbreaths

A coworker just came into the room to call the ICU and check with her father's nurse on his condition. Due to complications with his cancer (my question is, how can cancer really get any more complicated?), he has contracted pneumonia and is having heart palpitations. She asked the nurse if she was allowed to speak to him and I can only infer that the nurse said he was elsewhere getting tests and would be back later. So coworker just asked the nurse, calmly with no tremors in her voice, if she would let him know that she had called and that she loved him.

Listening to the whole conversation just totally left me watching a movie of my mother from last year in August when she was at Georgetown, wheeling her from the helicopter to the ICU, then up to the Bone Marrow ward, then repeatedly downdowndown for the numerous CAT scan, MRIs and xrays.

At the end of the movie I was left with one thought: I wish I could tell my mom how much I love her.

For some reason in the last 48 hours, I've had two people call in reference to my mother's death, my aunt has checked in on me (I've got to call her back tonight), and several people have talked to me about friends going through parents' dying and death. It seems to come like this for me, several weeks of relative quiet (although I thought of her a LOT in Ireland, and I even let go of a part of her there) and then I get whallopped by external cues.

Despite my relationship with her, I miss her.

happy momorial day

I have lived in my neighborhood for 11 years but I still almost drove right by the turn to my house. I was writing this post in my head and it was going something like this:

It was as she was driving that she realized again what she was doing instead of living her life. She was so rattled that she nearly missed her turn. What was so important about the study of herself that there were so many moments like these? Was it really so necessary that she study herself as if there was a PhD riding on it? PhD Candidate, Miss Self-Centered, being hooded by Dr Know-It-All for All-Time-Champion-Self-Study. Dissertation "Comparison and Contrast of Self With Others: Does Anyone Really Make Any Headway or Is It All a Cosmic Joke (with Alien Flagella)".

It's not often that I think of myself in the third person, which is why I think I nearly missed my turn. Ultimately, by looking at it that way, I think I was trying to shake myself into writing more regularly about interesting topics (besides birds and cake). It's obvious that I'm stuck in a rut these days and I'm doing my best to shake it loose. Despite the writing malaise, I've been remarkably creative lately, and while I really don't have much concrete to show for it, I'm doing a bang-up job of reminding myself of how just thinking creatively is a success. I am proud, which is something I rarely allow myself to experience, so I know I have made some progress, even though pride is one of the seven deadlies.

Today, incidentally, is the six-month anniversary of Mom's death. I'm certain that if she is still watching or aware of the fact that it is also Memorial Day, she is probably laughing. She always was one for the drama, my mother. Which is why I think I'm more apt these days to see her in slightly odd tableaus instead of through the "regular channels". For instance, at the Home Depot on Saturday, I was returning the cart while Bill revved the Jeep when I saw a triangularly-folded flag in the rear window of a Honda. It was setting stars-side-up, resting cattywompus off the back of the headrest, half in the sunlight and half in the shade cast by the roof--which is what I think caught my eye. Truly, it couldn't have been a better study of light and dark if Orson Welles had set up the shot himself (and who knows, maybe he's working for TSP now). I immediately flashed back to the soggy January day when the marines came to hand my father the flag from my mother's coffin as we all huddled next to him underneath the tent.

Mom was a Navy nurse for a relatively short period of time in her nursing career, and despite some hellacious stories of the Viet Vets at the Gainesville VA Hospital where she did some of her rounds, she'd never left American soil (even her stint at the GVA was done after she was no longer in the Navy). Still, in the last few years of her life it really appeared to irk her that she wasn't entitled to the same veteran's benefits that Dad gets. So it was a great thing for Dad to arrange an honor guard with 21-guns for her funeral rites, and I hope that gets him some points in the positive column with Posthumous Monica.

And, while it was movie cool that she got the honor she'd wanted during her life, it was just as movie heartbreaking to see the tears well up in my father's eyes as the master seargent handed him the folded flag, thanking my mother by proxy for her service to her country. It was one of the few times I saw my father cry in relation to her death, and probably the time that hit him hardest. That folded flag. You can't get much more closure than that for someone who's spent most of their life devoted to the military in one form or another.

All of this flashed through my mind instantly in the Home Depot parking lot and then I wondered: who would leave a flag folded that way, an obvious sign that it came off of a coffin, in the back window of their car? Especially in a state that implies it was casually thrown back there as you would a box of kleenex or one of those crown-shaped air fresheners? It left me wondering about the driver's relationship with the person who had passed. It was this thought, out of all the ramshackle thoughts about the flag, which brought the tears to my eyes.

But I shook them off before I reached the Jeep and Bill was none the wiser. I am, after all, making progress.

the one I've been putting off writing (aka, what to say to someone bereaved)

I just finished what I hope is my last bereavement thank you note. I can't say for sure because there continue to be stragglers, and my father just found out on Thursday that an entire contingent of his family had no idea my mother "transitioned". Cheers!

I now turn my attention to a difficult post which has been writing and rewriting itself in my head for over two months, ever since I started getting requests from people wanting to know what to say to someone who is recently bereaved, and more specifically, what to say to someone who has lost a mother. It's taken me so long because for some reason it seems harder to help people write these notes than it is to offer advice about how to thank people for recognizing a death. Writing a condolence note is extremely difficult, which is why most people fall back on purchasing a preprinted sentiment and signing their name to it. There is nothing wrong with doing this because, as with any gift, it's the thought that counts.

There are many reasons why it's difficult to know what to say following a death, but I think ultimately the uncertainty lies in the desperate need to be respectful of another's pain. That need is paralyzing, because no one wants to say anything that's a reminder of the loss for fear that the bereaved will break down crying. However, having been so recently bereaved, the following is crystal clear: No one has ever "reminded" me of my loss--whether I want to or not, I carry it with me wherever I go--and an acknowledgement of my mother's death has never made me feel worse than I already did. If tears come to my eyes after being asked how I'm doing, it's because I am grateful for a place to lay down my heavy load, even if it's just for a fleeting moment. And if I cry, it is because I trust you to comfort me until the pain passes.

That having been said, let's get down to specifics: Every situation is different and there is no blanket statement for bereavement. What I am about to share are merely guidelines and, in some cases, pie-in-the-sky idyllic examples of what would be nice to hear if you are the bereaved (and in other cases, blatant examples of what not to say).

Be honest.
The bereaved typically feel extremely vulnerable. Instead of fumbling around for the "right" words, if you don't know what to say, say that! Chances are they also have no idea what is expected of them in the situation and they will welcome your honesty. And, sadly I can say from experience, it sure beats being avoided.

Have a good memory about the deceased? Share it!
Most people want to remember the good things about the deceased, so writing something positive is always a safe bet. If you are lucky enough to have a memory of the deceased, it is customary to offer it to the bereaved. One of the best letters I got was one in which a friend shared an experience she had with my mother:

I will never forget when I met your Mom at your graduation. After years of talking about our moms I was anxious to meet her--maybe a little scared, too! I was struck by her immediate kindness to me: a big hug and "Lorie this" and "Lorie that". She knew me already and that made me feel good. You could tell that this was a woman who took her role as mom seriously. And I could tell how much she loved her kids. She was clearly proud to be there as your mom."

This brought tears to my eyes because it showed my mother in a positive light while also subtly addressing my need to know how important I was to her. Which leads us into a much trickier subsection:

What do you say if you know the relationship wasn't great?
Losing someone who was deeply loved but with whom there was also a dysfunctional relationship, especially if it was a parent, is its own special ring of hell with absolutely no respite. The pain is worse because the mourning is not only for the loss of the person as they were, it's also for the loss of their potential. No matter how prepared they think they are for this eventuality, the bereaved is staring down countless hours of deciphering the dysfunction, as they realize the relationship they have always fantasized about will never materialize.

Offering consolation in this case should only be attempted if you are intimately aware of the bereaved's situation, mainly due to so many opportunities for miscommunication. However, if you have the kind of relationship with the bereaved that will allow you to address their pain, I highly recommend doing so as this note was an unbelievable comfort to me:

Please forgive me for not responding sooner. I had no words at first and then didn't want to email a response...But I know through our many talks and hours of tumult in your relationship that this was iminent and would be painful [for you]. You know me so this is between us and is intended to help heal--you are a fabulous human being! Whatever void is left now that your mom has passed you will fill by living your life as fully as you desire. Go forward knowing you make a difference in all the lives you touch.

What makes this note so special is that it very simply recognizes my painful relationship with my mother, that there would be scars from her death, and that I was a good person despite all of that. Like I said before, bereavement leaves people exceptionally vulnerable, so recognizing these things will be appreciated more than you can imagine.

Also, it's ok if you wait a bit before offering this kind of support, particularly if you are a family member. My cousin, with whom I'd had no interaction prior to Mom's death, waited about 2-3 weeks after the funeral before writing to let me know that her family was well aware of "how M. was". Happy ending: we frequently email and I no longer feel marginalized by my relatives.

Don't just tell them to call you if they need something. Show up on their doorstep with cake.
I had an old neighbor do this to me two weeks ago and I can't tell you how much it meant to me. We weren't even that close, but when she found out about Mom's death from a mutual friend, she brought cake and visited with me for an hour and a half. We didn't even talk about Mom--it was just nice to be social for a while.

Don't say you know how they feel. You don't.
Every person experiences grief uniquely so to tell someone that you know exactly how they feel is not fair. I wouldn't even presume to tell any of my four siblings that I know exactly how they feel because each of our relationships with Mom was different. However, I can let them know when I can relate to the pain they are feeling, and offer my support. While this may seem like semantics, it's really just about having respect for another's ability to wade through the detritus of their own grief.

Also, it's a slippery slope from here to telling someone to snap out of it when you think they should be done grieving. It's not your place to try to rush another's grief, so don't.

Never, under any circumstances, use axioms like "Time heals all wounds".
My father actually trotted this one out at a Hospice family counseling session two days after Mom died. Like him, many people numbly repeat this phrase in the days and weeks after a death thinking it offers some kind of solace. It doesn't. In fact, it makes the bereaved feel as if their pain is being dismissed as incidental. Sure, pain does lessen over time; that's the nature of life. But you really shouldn't disrespect that pain in the interest of getting through an awkward moment.

If you say "He's in a better place now", "At least she's not suffering any more", "He's gone to God", you should know that you're not helping, you're hurting.
After a particularly painful death these seem to be the things that people fall back on--but even in writing that you can see the presumption that humans make, saying one death is more painful than another. The fact of the matter is that by remaining alive, we have no idea what it is like to die, nor do we know exactly where the deceased has gone. It may seem silly, but you might find yourself someday being forced to consider the nature of mortality and eternity after someone "helpfully" says something like this.

Additionally, for families like mine who have been there at the end, playing caregiver to a person increasingly ravaged by a disease designed to humiliate the deceased, saying something like this only serves to run brief movies of the last agonizing minutes of the deceased's life. You'd think a statement like 'they're in a better place now' would help alleviate that pain, but it does the exact opposite.

If you feel you must say this, at least wait a few weeks before doing so. The bereaved will thank you for it.

Keep asking how they're doing.
This sort of goes beyond what to say or to write immediately after someone dies. I have been guilty of this myself in the past, so I hardly have room to write this, but don't assume that someone will be ok three months after someone has died. If you are concerned enough to worry about what to say to them immediately following their loss, you really should try to follow up with them later. You've got a 60-40 chance that they'll say they're fine, but that's still 40% chance that they'll actually open up to you about how hard it was to get through a birthday, anniversary, holiday or life event without the support (however misguided) from the deceased.

------------

My hope is that this is even remotely helpful.

sleep talking

ALERT: I believe new agey crap. In my universe, it's entirely possible to get messages from the spiritual plane. Hell, most of the things I've designed have been "inspired"--once even by a talking burro in a Miro-esque dream. My point is, you can get messages from The Ancestors as long as you're not the stiffest person ever and are open to it.

After my grandmother passed, I had a dream where I was standing in the back doorway of her house. She was standing on the sidewalk telling me about how her rose bush was so beautiful. She also told me that the white roses were her absolute favorite, and didn't they smell wonderful? I can still remember the smell of those roses; I want a bush like that some day.

Anyway, the fact of the matter was that there wasn't a rose bush in her back yard and I had no idea what flowers she liked, so I always thought I was just channeling DH Lawrence's predilection for white flowers. Two years later, my Dad is talking to me on the phone when he tells me about Grandma's back yard. Apparently she had done all of this planting over the course of about 10 years and every spring she fussed over them like a nervous hen, but it never yielded the way she'd hoped. This year, everything was going crazy. In fact, Dad said, he'd completely forgotten that she'd planted a rose bush next to the back door, but there it was, huge, verdant, and absolutely covered in perfumy white roses. "Did you know those were her favorite?" he asked me.

Short version of this post:
Last night, I threw away my brother's dragonfly maggots. Mom told me she knew I was upset because our relationship was not good, but it was ok. Then a warthog, six meerkats and four baboons broke out of the zoo to eat our fried chicken. I cried (not as beautiful as Grandma's rose dream, but neither was my relationship with Mom).

This morning I got a wonderful email from James' mother that made me all emotional. To the way these things came together I say, keep praying, James, because you're bending the Big Guy's ear the right way.

I'm still sad, more today than I have been in three weeks, but I know I'm going to be ok. I just have to have a boo-hoo.

ripples in a huge sea

Back in late November when things were starting to go awfully wrong with Mom, Renie told one of her friends, who happens to have a three-year-old son. This little boy was just starting to realize what prayer was all about, so she suggested that he pray for my mommy (Monica) who was very sick. Every night he would say a prayer for Monica that she wouldn't feel so bad.

After Mom passed away, Ren's friend had a little hesitation about how to explain the situation to him. Death is a difficult concept for most adults to comprehend so it makes sense that he had some difficulty making the transition (he seemed stuck on why Jesus wanted Monica and just where exactly Monica was now). Apparently during this process he just stubbornly announced that he was going to continue praying for me because stopping altogether just didn't seem right to him.

Today I got this email from Renie:
James is still praying for Jen and he adds "Jesus just cause you wanted Jen's mom doesn't mean Jen have to be sad" When he is good and ready he will add someone else to his prayer list. Until then it is Jen and the Rochester Americans Hockey players.

Hearing that someone I didn't even know would have their toddler (!!) offer my mother's pain up to a higher being in his prayers, well, it blew my mind. But seriously, people, if you're not touched by the generousness of spirit in the child, well, you're nothing but a hollowed out shell.

And hey, if he's praying for the Rochester Americans I can't be all that bad.

Title

Time management and commitment are things I'm so sorely lacking right now.

That was a sentence I'd written in an email to a friend. In my head the sentence that was to follow was so profound I thought for certain I'd remember it to type here, but it didn't make the transition even though I stopped in the middle of that email to start writing this post. That in itself is a great window into what things in my mind are like these days. It's almost like looking for fish in muddy water; the light hits their irridescent gills as they come to the surface and just about the point I'm going to spear them for my dinner, they recede into the swirling Mississippi of my thought process.

I've been making lists of all the tasks I need to finish every day, but I never seem to have enough time do them all. What's more, I never have time to do the things I've come up with for inspiration. Empty is the DaVinci style notebook I purchased last week, wherein I was to store the vast list of movies I've never seen (leaving me culturally poor), ideas, and sketches. Still in the plastic bag with the stickers on them are the binders wherein I was going to organize my design idea file and my gardening ideas. And I have only read three of the nine books I checked out last week thinking that was going to jumpstart my design chops.

I don't feel jumpstarted at all. I feel overwhelmed and like my mental house is in as much chaos as the house in which I live (which has been constantly covered in dust for the last month and a half as Bill repairs the ceiling in the downstairs). If I could just figure out how to put more hours in the day and more commitment to focus in my head then everything would be ok. Only I have no control over the first at any point and I don't know how to get the second back under control either.

It sure doesn't feel like channels changing like they say on the adult ADD commercial. It feels more like the descriptions I've read about addiction withdrawal. Only I don't know what I'm addicted to besides television and food.